Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

codepigeon writes: I would like to ask for your advice on selecting a domain name registration service to use (possibly registration with website hosting?). The last time I registered a domain name was around 1999, so I am out of touch with the current offerings.

I have visited a few of the major players' websites. They seem (mostly) similar in prices and services. I have also seen both positive and negative reviews for those companies. I am concerned about being locked in, or surprised with hidden fees. (I paid $75US for a year of service in 1999, now it is only $10.99US?)

I have been trolling Slashdot for about 15 years and respect the views of the users here more than anywhere else. I would love to hear your advice and/or warnings in this matter. I am looking to register a domain name for a development studio that is at the ground level (read: I'm the sole member). I have published a single app to one of the big app stores already and want to have a 'web presence' to publish information about my software and give users a place to submit complaints/requests. I currently don't see the need for any kind of major backend support for the website; simple HTML or JavaScript.

Which is the most trustworthy company to use for registration? Which ones have hidden fees or privacy problems?

The regular lead bullets from even a small caliber short barrel weapon is too fast for eyes to see. But the speed of light phasers being fired by the storm troopers leave a neat clean visible tracer lines. That leads straight back to the location of the gun which helps Harrison Ford ample time to find good spot to dive into, no antique plane needed.

I can't believe I'm replying to a joke post but... (a) you're mixing your movies, phasers are Star Trek and blasters are Star Wars. (b) Blasters supposedly shoot charged plasma - you fill them with gas, they excite it to a plasma somehow, and the glowing plasma is what's shot at the targets. Don't ask me about turbo lasers on capital ships.

I really wish my dad had talked to me about girls. Not the birds and the bees bit, but about how girls and boys are both the same: afraid to get their feelings hurt, unsure how relationships should progress, often hurtful to others by accident. He could have explained that the easiest way to let someone know you like them is to smile and say "Hi" every time you see them. To not be afraid of physical contact like dancing or holding hands. That even if you say or do the wrong thing, make an embarrassing mistake, if the other person likes you they'll still like you afterwards. That a good first date involves just spending time together talking and getting to know one another (and that I should therefore avoid movies for a first date!) It took me years to figure that stuff out, and looking back I can see a dozen points in my life where a simple explanation from my dad could have opened my eyes and saved me grief. Thankfully my wife recognized that I was clueless the moment we met, and simply told me how she felt.

The New York Times reports that SpaceX will again attempt to recover a Falcon 9 launch vehicle, after the recent unsuccessful try; the company believes the lessons from the earlier launch have been learned, and today's launch will be loaded with more hydraulic fluid. This evening, the rocket is to loft the satellite nicknamed "GoreSat," after Al Gore, who envisioned it as a sort of permanent eye in space beaing back pictures of Earth from afar. The purpose of the satellite has evolved, though: Writes the Times: The observatory, abbreviated as Dscovr and pronounced “discover,” is to serve as a sentinel for solar storms: bursts of high-energy particles originating from the sun. The particles from a gargantuan solar storm could induce electrical currents that might overwhelm the world’s power grids, possibly causing continent-wide blackouts. Even a 15-minute warning could let power companies take actions to limit damage.

In Canada, the Radio Shack name was sold off years ago to Circuit City, and then when CC went under, bought up the Bell telco conglomerate, rebranding the stores as 'The Source' as another place to sell their cell phone packages and accessories. It looks familiar to Radio Shack, without any of the glory day components available for sale, selling cheap RC cars, computers and terrible audio equipment. The majority of stuff was labelled under a knock-off looking "Nexxtech" brand name. Again, inferior quality, but top-notch pricing.

So that's why I can't find anything useful there. I came back from New Zealand a few years ago, and was told by friends that Radio Shack was now "The Source", but when I went in they no longer had any of the stuff I needed. No bins of resistors or alligator clips or motors. No rolls of speaker wire, phone or network cabling. I have yet to find a replacement store that stocks hobby electronics like that, and I don't see the point in buying $5 of resistors off ebay and having to pay more than that in shipping.

I'm in the Canadian maritimes, if anyone has any recommendations for a new place to shop, I'd appreciate it.

HughPickens.com writes Nicola Davis writes at The Guardian that a new exhibition at London's Science Museum tiitled Churchill's Scientists aims to explore how a climate that mingled necessity with ambition spurred British scientists to forge ahead in fields as diverse as drug-discovery and operational research, paving the way for a further flurry of postwar progress in disciplines from neurology to radio astronomy. Churchill "was very unusual in that he was a politician from a grand Victorian family who was also interested in new technology and science," says Andrew Nahum. "That was quite remarkable at the time." An avid reader of Charles Darwin and HG Wells, Churchill also wrote science-inspired articles himself and fostered an environment where the brightest scientists could build ground-breaking machines, such as the Bernard Lovell telescope, and make world-changing discoveries, in molecular genetics, radio astronomy, nuclear power, nerve and brain function and robotics. "During the war the question was never, 'How much will it cost?' It was, 'Can we do it and how soon can we have it?' This left a heritage of extreme ambition and a lot of talented people who were keen to see what it could provide." (More, below.)

Bennett Haselton writes: They would never admit it, but your high school admins would probably breathe a sigh of relief
if all of their sexting-mad students would go ahead and install Snapchat so that
evidence of (sometimes) illegal sexting would disappear into the ether. They can't recommend
that you do this, because it would sound like an implicit endorsement, just like they can't
recommend designated drivers for teen drinking parties -- but it's a good bet they would
be grateful.
Read on for the rest.

The internet is a great place to search for some kinds of information; Amazon (or L.L. Bean, or Digi-Key, or any retailer, really) do their best to connect you with all the products in their databases, and for lots of other search topics, the usual handful of general purpose search engines can ferret out answers based on your keywords. Addresses are sometimes harder to search, but in the UK at least that might soon be much easier: An anonymous reader writes The London based startup and open data advocacy organization Open Addresses UK wants to change all of that by inviting the public to collect and validate housing addresses to build the biggest UK open address dataset ever. To do so, they launched UK's first open and free address list on Wednesday, calling on individuals and companies to crowdsource information."
What if you want the equivalent of an unlisted number, though?

puddingebola notes that Samsung's first smartphones powered by its Tizen operating system have gone on sale in India. "After plenty of speculation and an abort launch in Russia last year, Samsung has finally managed to release its first phone powered by the Tizen operating system. The Samsung Z1 is coming to India initially, where it is available to buy for 5,700 INR — that’s around $92 — from today. The Z1 is an affordable device, both in price and specs. It packs a four-inch WVGA PLS screen, and is powered by a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor and 768 MB RAM. There’s a 3.1-megapixel camera on the rear, and a limited VGA camera on the front. The phone runs version 2.3 of the Tizen operating system, and comes with 4GB of on-device storage which can be expanded by up to 64GB via a micro SD card. It supports dual SIMs, as is commonplace with devices in India."

New submitter brynet tips this news from Theo de Raadt:
Over the last two months Mike Larkin (mlarkin@) modified the amd64 kernel to follow the W^X principles. It started as a humble exercise to fix the .rodata segment, and kind of went crazy. As a result, no part of the kernel address space is writeable and executable simultaneously. At least that is the idea, modulo mistakes. Final attention to detail (which some of you experienced in buggy drafts in snapshots) was to make the MP and ACPI trampolines follow W^X, furthermore they are unmapped when not required. Final picture is many architectures were improved, but amd64 and sparc64 look the best due to MMU features available to service the W^X model. The entire safety model is also improved by a limited form of kernel ASLR (the code segment does not move around yet, but data and page table ASLR is fairly good."

sciencehabit writes When predators get close, the bright, orange-lipped "disco clam" flashes them to scare them off. But it's not just the light that's important. Researchers have found that the clam has sulfur in its fleshy lips and tentacles and suspect that, like another clam species that drop tentacles laden with sulfuric acid to deter predators, the disco clam's sulfur also gets converted into a distasteful substance. The flashing may warn predators away, similar to the bright orange of a monarch butterfly warning birds of its toxic taste.

antdude points out this story about one of the problems with our ever increasingly disposable world. "Young people in Britain have become a lost generation who can no longer mend gadgets and appliances because they have grown up in a disposable world, the professor giving this year's Royal Institution Christmas lectures has warned. Danielle George, Professor of Radio Frequency Engineering, at the University of Manchester, claims that the under 40s expect everything to 'just work' and have no idea what to do when things go wrong. Unlike previous generations who would ‘make do and mend’ now young people will just chuck out their faulty appliances and buy new ones. But Prof George claims that many broken or outdated gadgets could be fixed or repurposed with only a brief knowledge of engineering and electronics. "